Lisk Magazine provides a summary of the main questions discussed, divided by argument.

ROADMAP ( + SDK AND SIDECHAINS):

“When we can expect the new Roadmap?”

Answered by eddows, Vice President & CTO“Since February’s relaunch event the Lightcurve Science team have been working extensively to research a large number of protocol changes aimed at solving some of Lisk’s immediate challenges, forming a definitive tactical roadmap towards achieving Lisk’s SDK and sidechain concept.

The roadmap is still kept private, until all aspects have been reviewed and confirmed.

We have grouped our proposals into batches and intend to reveal them one batch at a time via an open-source repository.

We will then be encouraging the community to participate in a discussion-based mailing list for receiving feedback and comments before we move forward implementation work.

Each group will be broken into milestones and given a short-term deadline for the development team. The deadlines will be communicated on GitHub.

The first batch of proposals will be released in the near future.

The roadmap presented in November was based on overly optimistic estimations of the workflow, that unfortunately failed to capture the complexity of what we are building at Lightcurve.

In summary, the roadmap is coming, but we are taking our time to do things professionally, and this is one big reason why it has taken a lot of effort and time to prepare. Our commitment runs deep and we are all very excited by the changes we will bring to the Lisk network.

We don’t speculate anymore – we deliver.“

POWER CONCENTRATION AMONG DELEGATES

“What are your thoughts on the vote power concentration among established delegates groups?”

Answered by thomelsch, Head of Marketing“Based on my own research, I believe the ideal consensus algorithm is yet to be designed. It’s likely that there will always remain a certain degree of subjectivity to what people think is “fair”. Our industry has a broader issue of consensus algorithms that require improvements and some are more centralised than others. Appropriate solutions will be developed as the the industry matures.

Our Science Team is researching and testing improvements to the Lisk protocol, including the consensus algorithm and the voting process. For the moment, the 101 delegates provide a good tradeoff between decentralization and efficiency. Although not always noted by our community, many delegates use their resources and time to contribute to the ecosystem. For example, Elite group just opened a 500 square meter incubator in China (https://blog.lisk.io/introducing-elite-center-the-worlds-first-lisk-incubator-e8d7abb26b5), delegates like Carbonara provided key pull requests, StellarDynamic driving Lisk’s awareness and adoption by hosting events all throughout the USA or Alepop achieving Trezor integration. Most importantly, they are all very engaged and have the skills required to run a forging node. The recent migration of Core 1.0.0 to mainnet happened within less than 24 hours. All 101 delegates showcased a significant effort to successfully secure the network and support the Lightcurve development team. They share our high demands for the most intensive security of the network.”

MODULARITY OF THE LISK ECOSYSTEM

“Are you building the Lisk platform in a modular way?”

Answered by diego_gm, Backend Developer“We are working on a proposal for a flexible, resilient and modular Lisk Core Architecture. We are close to open sourcing this proposal in our GitHub repo.

Modular approach is the way to go for modern Blockchain architectures. It provides better scalability along with easy-to-extend interfaces. It introduces resilience on Lisk Core nodes by its unique multi-process support. Furthermore, it will separate the Lisk Core domains, which will speed up the development process.

The approach has been well-discussed and reviewed by the experts among the team including the Science guys.”

LISK BRAND AWARENESS

“What are the plans to increase Lisk brand awareness, improve social media following etc?”

Answered by thomelsch, Head of Marketing
“Across 2017 and 2018, I’ve noticed that increased brand awareness occurs in two different scenarios that require a different approach, relying on market sentiment:

People come to us / bullish market: In times of a bullish market it is easier to reach new people because traders are out there looking for the latest news, as well as investment opportunity. During a bullish market sentiment people come to our website, start following us on social media and educate themselves on the hottest topics of blockchain technology through the Lisk Academy.

General approach aka we reach out to people during a bearish market: During times of a bearish market – especially before the SDK – increasing brand awareness needs a thought-out strategy, that goes beyond cryptocurrency community and starts to tackle our future users. Besides continuing with everything we have been doing before, three topics dictate the marketing and business agenda of Lisk in 2019: Growth hacking, increasing (developer) engagement and business development.

How? New Lisk Ambassador Program, Lisk Accelerator Program, Website 2.0, Academy 2.0, new Bug Bounty Program, expanding scientific efforts beyond Lightcurve, increased paid promotions (e.g. StackOverflow, YouTube, offline), exploring partnerships with companies & universities, increase value for traders through additional exchanges, payment processors, hardware wallet support and exploring custodian options for institutional investors. And of course promote and support ICOs on the Lisk platform. We are also going to several events, such as React Day in Berlin and other conferences.The best way to keep updated is by visiting https://lisk.io/events.

We will feature a section on the new marketing & business strategy in the next Business Vlog, so keep your eyes on our social media channels!”

INTERNAL DEVELOPMENTS

“Has the onward development after Core 1.0 increased in speed like you hoped?”

Answered by diego_gm, Backend Developer“The Lisk Core team structure has been adjusted to focus with full attention on both Team Management and the project’s Technicalvision at the same time. This has already proved to be an effective approach with a more agile development process which allows for faster release cycles. There are already three minor milestones (1.1, 1.2 and 1.3) awaiting to get the final check from the quality assurance phase in order to reach finally the public networks.

At the same time, we aim to decrease the reaction time to new issues by introducing Lisk Core Pipelines. This consists of five separate pipelines to enable more effective prioritisation of tasks. A decision making diagram has been implemented to guide managers in achieving a consistent behaviour when handling new issues and placing them into the correct pipeline.”

NEWRELIC AND SIDECHAINS

Is “newrelic” here to stay? And will sidechains use it for free to monitor their API´s?

“Yes, it stays. We are very happy from the results of the “newrelic” analysis we’ve made so far. We got the full overview of all of API endpoints and DB queries performance. It’s a necessary step before the performance improvements of those.

The tool can be customized a lot to serve any custom processes a potential sidechain developer would like to investigate on. That was the main intention behind making the repo public. We used the paid version of “newrelic” that provides with the overview of all internal function calls in addition to the free one. But the free license provides a lot of important informations as well.

In the future, we will extend the library – think about benchmarking of transactions or block processing.”

To conclude..

Many users were not completely satisfied with this AMA, arguing that it was rather vague and did not really add value to what they already knew. All eyes on the Lisk Foundation, that rarely betrayed its promises, we are waiting to see the upcoming developments!